


primum non nocere

by thisisthefamilybusiness



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Amputation, Bad Ethics, Blackwatch Era, Blackwatch Genji Shimada, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Dark Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, Doctor-Patient Relationships, Gen, Gore, Heavy Angst, Horror, I can't warn y'all strongly enough for the gore/body horror, Medical Consent Problems, Medical Experimentation, Medical Procedures, Medical Trauma, Moral Dilemmas, Pre-Canon, Pre-Crisis, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 01:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10980432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisisthefamilybusiness/pseuds/thisisthefamilybusiness
Summary: “What did you do to me?” Genji hisses, snarling.“I saved you,” the soft voice says, and clicks something on Genji’s shoulder that must be a button for the painkiller pump, because Genji’s world gets a little hazier, a little harder to make sense of.“Why?” Genji manages, tongue thick in his throat as the high from the painkillers sets in. “Why couldn’t you leave me dead?”“What sort of doctor would I be then, if I didn’t save people?” There’s a girlish giggle from the soft voice, like Genji’s suffering is amusing to her.“A kinder one.” Genji grinds out, before the high overtakes him completely.





	primum non nocere

**Author's Note:**

> What started as a question posed by a friend morphed into an exploration of how nice Mercy must really be if she'd turn a dying man into a cyborg without his consent, which then turned into a thin excuse for writing good old fashioned ore/body horror. 
> 
> I am so serious about all those tags, it gets pretty nasty in here at times. 
> 
> Mercy is not nice in this fic. She pretends very well at being nice, but this is tagged with dark!Mercy for a reason.

The strike team touches down in barely enough time.

When callsign Mercy arrives on the point, what greets her is barely recognizable as a human body. It’s a mangled pile of torn flesh with exposed bone and muscle peeking through, lying in a pool of drying blood. Ana has thrown down three biotic grenades and there are field medics trying to stop the bleeding with quick-clot solution and tourniquets, to no avail.

“I’m with you,” Angela says comfortingly, even though there’s no way the bloody remains of what once was Genji Shimada can hear her, snapping a clean pair of latex gloves on. She cannot do too much, out here in the open—she needs her OR, her team of nurses and assistants—but she will not let him die. She passes a field medic her staff and shows them how to hold a biotic stream so she can work on Shimada without fear of him slipping into death.

And then her work begins.

The quick-clot was never intended to staunch this amount of blood, but it has done the best it can. The tourniquets are more effective, but after wiping away drying blood it becomes clear to Angela that Shimada’s right arm—covered in long cuts so deep the bone is exposed in places—is a lost cause, as are his legs—a bloody pulp that made Ana turn away to gag quietly when Angela managed to slice away Shimada’s pants. His chest has been punctured by a dozen arrows, which have all been snipped down to as short as possible by one of the first medical responders. Angela does not dare to attempt removal of them until she’s in an OR, but she does bandage around them, daubs quick-clot solution over them.

Slowly, the thin white ribbons of flesh knit together into ugly lumps of scar tissue, healing around bone that stuck through his flesh and the arrows in his chest cavity. Soft pink-red muscle is exposed in places where the distance was too great for the skin to bridge on its own. She will have to slice the scars all back open with a scalpel, later, and peel his flesh back over his body in the correct fashion.

The bleeding, largely, has stopped, as much as it can be with only the supplies in their kits and Angela’s staff. She punches an IO line in Shimada’s sternum, and a few younger medics flinch at the noise as it pierces his clavicle, though they still administer fluids through it like they’re told.

For now, Genji Shimada will live.

“Do you need an OR prepped here, ma’am, or are we taking him on transport?” one of the field medics asks Angela as she peels off her bloodied gloves.

Angela eyes Shimada, who is gently being transferred onto a litter. What work she must do cannot be done in a conventional hospital. She needs her researchers, her materials, her own OR.

“Transport, please.” She smiles. Shimada will survive. Angela will see to it.

* * *

The first round of surgery is the most trying. Shimada spends six hours under the knife as Angela decides what can and cannot be salvaged from the wreckage of his body, trying to preserve as much of him as possible.

A lesser surgeon would have either lost Shimada or not bothered, labelling him as a hopeless case and a waste of resources. But Angela has always taken pride in her ability to do what other surgeons could or would not.

When Shimada comes out of surgery, what remains is his trunk, his left arm, and—more or less, seeing as how his jaw had been macerated and his face slashed several times—his face. The elder Shimada had done, Angela decided, a very fine job of making sure any common doctor would never be able to repair Genji.

Morrison and Reyes begin bombarding Angela with questions the moment she leaves the OR, still in blood-spattered scrubs.

“How soon until he’s fit for questioning?” Reyes asks, arms folded over his chest, already scowling.

Angela paces down the corridor of the medbay, towards her office. “One, two months, I estimate. I need to keep him unconscious until I at least have most of his body assembled, to minimize the shock and risk of rejection.”

Morrison shoots her a look, eyebrow raised as he follows her. “Assemble his body?”

“You wanted him as an asset for Overwatch, yes?”

“You said he was barely alive—”

“I will make him an asset for Overwatch.” Angela smiles placidly, opening the door to her office. “But it will take time.”

Morrison and Reyes glance at each other. Angela knows that in moments like this, she can seem rather frightening, more like a mad scientist than a specialty surgeon.

“If we said no—” Reyes starts.

“Genji Shimada will die.” Angela hits a key on her keyboard, holoscreens blinking into life. “He is paralyzed from his T12 vertebra down. He lost both his legs and his right arm, and his left arm will never return to full capacity. He is blind. He is completely dependent on machines to do everything from filter his blood to a tube to feed him. His jaw was completely shattered, and it will take two more surgeries to fix that alone. And the mental toll, knowing his brother tried to kill him—could you imagine what that quality of life would be?”  

A series of drawings and technical charts pop up on the screens. It takes both Morrison and Reyes a moment to realize what they’re looking at.

“You’re gonna turn him into a cyborg?” Reyes asks skeptically.

“As I said before, Major Reyes, I will make him into an asset for Overwatch. With Strike-Commander Morrison’s consent, of course.” Angela flips to a hasty sketch of what Shimada’s new body will look like, drawn by one of her lab assistants while Angela was operating.

Red and black armor plating layered over bright red synthetic muscle, flexible white underplating covering the gaps in the armor, tubing everywhere—and a striking gray faceplate that would cover the parts of his facial damage not even Angela would be able to properly repair.

“You know it’s going to work?” Morrison says.

Angela grins and nods. “I am not always a miracle worker, but this time I am.”

* * *

Angela pretends to get misty-eyed when she has to show off what work she’s done on the ruins of the youngest Shimada, calling it a tragedy. She would almost be convincing, Jack thinks, if she didn’t smile at the hydrogel chamber with that glassy-eyed shark’s grin when she thought everyone was gone.

Her work is incredible, there’s no denying that. Shimada has gone from a body that closer resembled ground beef than it did a human body, to a distinctly humanoid form. In the earlier stages, before the last round of surgery, he looked worse that he’d looked lying on the concrete of the Hanamura temple, ugly wire framework holding his bones in place and heavy black stitches joining patches of synthetic skin to real flesh.

Now, his torso is covered in metal interlocking plates except for his left shoulder and a section of his chest. There’s metal ports connecting tubing in places in his skin, and clean metal sockets where the limbs Angela has Torbjörn building will be placed. It won’t be long until Shimada will be ready for deployment.

The entire concept nauseates Jack, truthfully. They’ve sunk almost a million dollars into rebuilding Shimada, and Jack’s had to lie to the UN about the legality of turning a man into a cyborg without his explicit consent. If not for Angela’s reputation as a beacon of mercy and morals (and her tearful explanation to the UN council that it was her duty as a doctor to do everything she could to save a life, how she would rather die than lose a patient), the whole thing would have gone under by now. 

What they’re doing here violates every code of ethics and morality that Jack can think of. Shimada isn’t leaving Overwatch when they finish repairing him—not alive, at least—even if he doesn’t want anything to do with the organization. He’ll fight for them, whether he does so willingly or not. He’s cost them too much.

Jack had always been asked to only recruit and hire doctors who had never taken the Hippocratic Oath by the UN, for reasons he hadn’t understood until Shimada had been brought in and he saw Angela at work. He hadn’t bothered to even look the damn oath up until he saw Shimada suspended in the hydrogel and Angela smiling at him like a snake smiles at a bird’s nest.

_Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. Above all, I must not play at God._

After reading that line, Jack finally understood why Angela had been so willing to take on Shimada's case.

* * *

There are long, agonizing moments of clarity in the darkness that Genji has come to know as his new home.

They have become more frequent now, but they never get less distressing or less excruciating. His body burns like it’s on fire, and he can’t breathe—his lungs and airway filled with some sticky slick substance and leaves him gagging. He can’t even move, can’t do more than try to scream, but even that is denied to him.

He cannot even see.

What new torture is this? Was simply killing him not enough for Hanzo? Death would have been a welcome respite compared to this cycle of anguish and darkness.

It takes many cycles before Genji is finally awakened.

Gloved hands gently wipe the slickness from his skin, massaging his chest so he could expel the fluid from his lungs easier. A soft voice is telling him that’s hydrogel, and he’ll be fine, but he has to relax—but how can he relax when he can’t move his limbs, when he’s blind and paralyzed on a cold metal tabletop?

“—name is Dr. Ziegler. You are in the Overwatch headquarters in Switzerland,” the soft voice says. “Do not try to speak just yet, we have to cut the wires first.”

Genji jerks his head towards the source of the sound. Overwatch. Overwatch. The UN group that had been watching their family for the past year. The soft voice is speaking English with a strange accent Genji can’t place.

A hand holds his head down against the table and Genji tries to snarl, but to his horror, he can barely get his jaw open a fourth of the way before it refuses to give anymore, wired shut. A cold metal tool is pressed in his mouth, and there’s a copper tang as it snips the wire holding his jaw in place.

“There,” the soft voice murmurs. A hand cups his jaw. “We have started your pump off on a low dose of painkillers, but we can increase it a bit if you are experiencing more discomfort.”

“What happened to me?” Genji finally growls out, voice harsh with disuse. “Where is Hanzo? What happened to me?”

“Hanzo is missing. We have units looking for him. As for why you can’t move…” The soft voice fades away, like its owner is walking away for a moment, only to return after a second. “You lost much in the fight against your brother. We did what we could to save you.”

Genji’s heart starts racing. “What happened to me?” he repeats.

“You lost all of your limbs but your left arm, which I had to reconstruct from very little. We have built you a new body, but we are only sixty percent done with the process. But when we are finished, you will have full—if not better than before, even—control over your body again, including sight. It will just take some time.”

“No.” This was wrong. Hanzo had to have killed him. Genji had always been weaker than Hanzo, had always taken his training less seriously. Hanzo wasn’t so careless as to let Genji escape alive.

Genji thinks of that night, of the temple in the moonlight, of his brother’s stony serious expression when he raised his bow. Of the searing pain he’d felt crawling through his body when Hanzo kept landing blows, long after he’d been done. Of the knife Hanzo had slashed through his face again and again even after Genji was dying on the temple floor, so he would be unrecognizable as the youngest Shimada brother, so Genji’s death would not disgrace the family name.

Of lying there, in a pool of his own blood, and knowing the last thing he would ever see was his brother telling him he was disgusting. That he was a disgrace. A dishonor to the Shimada name.

 _That_ world at least had the mercy to let him fade from consciousness before he could feel Hanzo slice over his eyes.

Nobody could have survived that. It was impossible.

“Yes,” the soft voice says. “I dislike having to wake you before the entire process is done, as I know it must be jarring not to have your sight or sensation in your limbs, but Major Reyes was very insistent on talking to you as soon as possible.”

“What did you do to me?” Genji hisses, snarling.

“I saved you,” the soft voice says, and clicks something on Genji’s shoulder that must be a button for the painkiller pump, because Genji’s world gets a little hazier, a little harder to make sense of.

“Why?” Genji manages, tongue thick in his throat as the high from the painkillers sets in. “Why couldn’t you leave me dead?”

“What sort of doctor would I be then, if I didn’t save people?” There’s a girlish giggle from the soft voice, like Genji’s suffering is amusing to her.

“A kinder one.” Genji grinds out, before the high overtakes him completely. 

* * *

There was a time when Genji had hated Angela for what she did to him. For leaving him with so little that he could genuinely call his own.

For not leaving him dead in a shrine, his body mangled unrecognizably by his brother.

For forcing him to join Overwatch to pay a debt for something he never asked for. Morrison at least had the dignity to be ashamed when he told Genji exactly why he wasn’t allowed to leave—that his body was not his, it was an Overwatch project funded by the UN. There had been piles of paperwork with his own signature on them that Genji knew he’d never sighed, a scheduled meeting with an omnic lawyer who saw potential in Genji’s case against Overwatch that got cancelled and Genji got reprimanded for even trying to make, because Genji’s very existence was a highly classified project.

For using him, his body as an experiment, and for being confused when he was not grateful for what she had done.

Overwatch ending in an explosion of smoke and dust should have freed Genji, but even that is not enough. Genji is uniquely alone in this world, the only person to be so extensively rebuilt. There is only person who is qualified to maintain his new body, but he refuses to see her.

In the monastery in the mountains, among the Shambali, Genji comes to accept what happened to him. He does not come to forgive Angela, even after she sends him the photos the field medics had taken that night at the shrine.

His body had truly been a disaster, little more than a mass of broken bone and torn muscle and ragged skin in a pool of deep red. It makes Genji nauseous to look at the images for too long.

She should have left him dead.

It is easier to forgive Hanzo. His brother had known nothing but their family in his life. He had known nothing but duty. When the _oyabun_ asked for Hanzo to kill Genji, Hanzo had seen no choice but to do it. What he had done was the only option he’d had.

There are rumors, now, of an unknown figure that broke into Shimada Castle and laid out an offering in the shrine on the same spring night every year.

Hanzo’s time in the Shimada-gumi had ended quite quickly after Genji’s death, it seemed.

Meditating in the snow with the Shambali, Genji comes to realize what he must do. His left arm is not as strong as it should be, and his joints do not move as smoothly as they did years ago, when Angela and her staff had been taking painstaking care of Genji.

He cannot forgive her, but he can accept his body for what it is, and he can use it to his advantage.

* * *

“Oh, Genji, what happened to you?” Angela whispers, and Genji rolls his eyes beneath his faceplate. The watery eyes are an old trick of hers, as though Genji was not familiar with who Angela truly was.

“You happened,” Genji says, clicking his faceplate free. “If I remember correctly. But that is not what I am here about.” He sets the faceplate down on the paper-covered exam table.

Angela nods and pulls up a holoscreen. “You need maintenance?” she guesses. She smiles at him, a feeble attempt at a comforting action.

Genji laughs. “I need a new body.”

The fake smile drops away, and in its place is the same expression Genji has seen on predators circling prey. “Oh?”

“My reflexes are not as fast as they used to be. My left arm is considerably slower and weaker than my right. The synthetic eyes need replacing. The exposed tubing is a risk in combat,” Genji lists off, counting down on his fingers.

“This will take months of work, Genji. You will have to be deactivated for me to do this, and I don’t have all the same resources as last time.”

“But that is not a no, Dr. Ziegler.” Genji smiles. “You see, I have made peace with what I am. And what I am could be better.”

**Author's Note:**

> There is a short little sequel thing that is inspired by a prompt from the kinkmeme that I'll post soon, it just didn't fit with the flow of this narrative. But it does show Hanzo finally seeing exactly what he did to Genji, so, more body horror, yay.
> 
>  
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://officialclaricestarling.tumblr.com) | play overwatch with me @ clstarling#1290 | talk to me on discord @ claricestarling#4370 (just say you're from ao3 if you wanna talk, I love chatting w/ y'all & I take prompts!) | | [deleted]


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